Page 16 of Bought By the Masked BRATVA
The implication lingers.She’sunder my protection.
His mother doesn’t comment, just nods politely, though I can see the flicker of surprise she’s trying to hide. “Of course. I’ll have the blue room prepared.”
I murmur athank you, my voice barely steady, and follow Liam up the stairs. My pulse thrums with unease. Every step into this house feels like crossing another invisible line.
When we reach the landing, he opens a door to a beautiful, high-ceilinged room that smells faintly of lilac. The bed is enormous, the windows overlooking the forest.
“Rest,” he says simply.
But as he turns to leave, something inside me cracks. “This wasn’t what I signed up for,” I whisper. “I thought I was selling information. Buying protection. Not…” I gesture around helplessly. “This.”
He pauses in the doorway, looking back at me. “This is protection, Grace. It’s just not the kind you were expecting.”
He rubs a thumb over my jawline and I turn into his hand.
“You’re safer outside of the city, at least while the warrants for your arrest get pulled.” He kisses my forehead and my stomach knots with confusion. “I have someone working on finding evidence of Hartley’s behaviour towards the women who work for him. You aren’t the only person who turned him down, the others just didn’t know as much as you do.”
A sickness begins to roil in my stomach.
Of course I wasn’t the only one. Ex-colleagues start filtering through my mind. Women who were there one day and had “moved-on” the next. Only they never moved on in the same work. I never saw them again.
I pull at the seam of the lining of bag and retrieve the drive I had hidden there.
I hand it to Liam. “It’s everything I have, all of my work for the last five years.”
He closes his fingers around it. “You understand that I will take this information and use it for my own gain too.” It’s not a question, but I nod my head anyway.
There’s a silence for a while where we both adjust to the weight of what’s happening, then he drops his mouth to mine and for that moment everything fades away beneath the press of his lips on mine. The light sweep of his tongue, relights the fire in me that had begun to flicker under the strain of the last week.
“I’ll be back later, make yourself at home. My family are nosey, so be prepared for questions.”
I huff out a laugh. “Luckily, I’m a pro at handling questions.”
When he’s gone, I sink onto the bed and take a deep, steadying breath. The laughter from downstairs echoes faintly, and I think of my mother. Her warm hands, the smell of rosemary from her garden, the way she’d hum under her breath while cooking. My father’s voice, steady and kind.
They would’ve hated this. Seeing me like this, hiding in a stranger’s house, a criminal’s home, belonging to a man I barely know.
A man who terrifies me almost as much as he steadies me.
I close my eyes and press my palms to my face. I didn’t plan for this. I didn’t plan forhim.
I thought I’d walk away from that ballroom as someone’s acquisition, a deal struck in blood and money. But this isn’t business. Not anymore.
This feels like something else entirely. Something that could swallow me whole if I’m not careful.
I don’t know how long I sit there after Liam leaves. Long enough for the sound of his footsteps to fade.
I smooth a hand over the quilt and stand, pushing away the heaviness that’s been curling in my stomach since he left. I can’t just sit here, waiting like some fragile secret he’s smuggled home.
The corridor outside my room is lined with old portraits. Oil paint and gilt frames. Generations of Orlovs, I assume. Men with proud shoulders and severe expressions; women who look like they never learned to smile. I pass them one by one until I catch the scent of something warm drifting up from below. Coffee, cake, bread maybe. My stomach betrays me with a low growl.
The kitchen is bright, sunlight spilling across white stone counters and copper pots that hang like polished ornaments. It’s the kind of room that looks lived-in, not staged.
And there, at the wide farmhouse table, are two women. Both of them look over when I hover in the doorway.
“Hello Grace,” the older one says first, her tone gentle but assessing. She stands by the stove, stirring something in a cast-iron pan. There’s an elegance to her, but not the brittle kind. She moves like someone used to being obeyed without ever having to raise her voice. “I’m Saoirse, by the way, Liam’s mother.”
I smile. I can see it, just faintly, in the shape of her eyes.
